Revelation and Resistance

The Light of What Comes After by Jen Town

Bauhan Publishing, 2018

96 pages, paperback, $16.00

Lately I have heard folks in positions of power tell young people to go in fear of irony, that irony is a hiding place for the chronically disengaged and disenchanted, that it signals a deep cynicism when what we need is earnest, active resistance in an increasingly hostile world.

I have a simple quibble with this: without irony there would be no poetry, and without poetry there is no resistance.

Okay, maybe I am oversimplifying.

Maybe what I mean to say is, our language—by its very nature—is chock-full of contradiction, complication, subversion, and elision, but it is with language that we must communicate who we are and who we wish to be.

There is an irony here, and it is the poet’s job to expose it.

Irony, at its best, teases out the difficulties inherent in language and—by extension—in the self’s formation. It is a subtle art and requires a deft hand. Jen Town has such a hand.

“I’ve often been accused of being a latchkey with no latch,” says the speaker in Town’s poem “Spun,” which, like many in her award-winning debut collection The Light of What Comes After, addresses the formation of identity through mediation and speculation.

The I of these poems is shaped in response to social and cultural expectations, creating inside itself a metaphysical window—not to be confused with an emptiness, but rather an opportunity, an opening between representation and reality, like a “space in the air where the ballerina momentarily spun.”

I say opportunity, because Town’s poems provide just that—a new way of seeing, a slant (to reference Dickinson, one of Town’s foremothers) way of exploring a young woman’s coming of age among books, movies, art—from a well-intentioned but sheltered childhood, to the sometimes-hard truths of life as an American woman.

These ironies aggregate throughout the book, are pasted and layered across the self with decoupage artistry. There are accusations in poems “Short Autobiography on Tiptoes” (“she’d been accused to of being too much and always / in earnest”) and “Spun” (“I’ve often been accused of being a latchkey with no latch”) as well as the consequences of growing up “to believe / in the essential good” (“Short Autobiography on Tiptoes”).

In fact, in The Light of What Comes After, “goodness” and “happiness”—two touchstones of a virtuous, Midwestern upbringing—are repeatedly turned over and re-examined, questioned, and prodded, as we see in the poem “Invisible Self-Portraits in a Dark Room”:

I believe myself to be

a sympathetic character

but formed to what

purpose, I’m not sure.

Even more interestingly, in the world of Town’s poems, the self is not only created in the crucible of societal expectations but in the conventions of genre like autobiography, self-portrait, still life, romance, spy novel—poetics the self has internalized and re-contextualized.

For example, in “Needles Piercing Cloth,” Town writes,

It was a world of décolletage,

the diaphanous thrills

of forgetting—lily skin

draped in spring and sugar

sifting through fingers—pollen’s

golden settling on footstool

and ottoman, pie rack

and ice box. A world of garden

walls aflame with bloom.

There is undeniable beauty in the configuration of these artifacts, in the positioning of sensual, musical language, but it is a scene without people. Then (emphasis mine),

and yet: inside we drifted like

smoked bees in a silence

through which clocks

ticked, sound of silver needles

piercing cloth.

The latent violence becomes palpable via domesticity—the surface belies an underground tension. We peer beneath the female-centric, superficial benevolence (needlepoint and décolletage) to see the worry underneath, a technique found again in “Charming,” which opens with, “Her father says You’re living in a fairy tale,” and ends with:

… She gathers flowers by

the roadside, weaves them into a rope for her escape. They shrivel and

curl up into tiny fists, a string of fists that blow apart in the wind.

These are poems that are at once in love with language and at odds with it—as we all must be. Town’s ear for prosody is playful, physical. Her lines are masterful. But what I love most about Town’s poetry is its subtlety. The poems’ balance between despair and delight is so elegantly calibrated, so delicately fashioned, so utterly attentive to the small fractures, fissures, disappointments, and fleeting joys of adulthood, that one could say Town’s sensitivity to language is preternatural and that her nuanced, delightfully subversive voice is a revelation. So, let me say it: Town’s The Light of What Comes After is a revelation.

She—like many of us—was a girl who grew up to be a woman, both charmed by the trimmings and trappings of her gender’s norms and highly critical of them. She faces the gaps between expectations and realities with a wry wit and realizes—rightly so—that who we think we are and who others think we are—creates a tension rife with both humor and pain. This is resistance.

Town’s poems aren’t for the faint-hearted, though they are very much the product of a delicate sensibility.

Oh, the irony!

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No te metas

As hard as she can, Griselda pinches the skin between her thumb and pointing finger. The pain is a distraction. Earlier today, her dad grabbed her heavy metal t-shirts, favorite black hoodie, and smelly socks and stuffed them inside a black suitcase. The suitcase now stands by the open front door, and Griselda can see her dad. He’s outside by the yellowing yard with his head tucked under the hood of a fender-dented Ford pickup. Griselda sits on the couch while her dad fidgets with Craftsman tools. He’s trying to get his truck started by working on the carburetor, which Griselda hopes he can’t fix.

Her mother left them eight months ago. Since then, her dad has gone weeks without bathing, days without eating.

After an hour of tinkering, he tries turning on the ignition. The engine flutters. It’s a false start, and Griselda is relieved. She breathes deeply, tilts her head back, and gazes at the sparkled popcorn ceiling. The music coming out of the truck’s speakers reminds her of when her dad, in exchange for a powerful sound system, put several crisp fifty-, twenty-, and ten-dollar bills in the palm of a vendor at the Roadium open-air swap-meet that had once been a drive-in theater.

Singing along to his music, Griselda is dismayed that she knows all the words to “No te metas con mi cucu.” She didn’t know she had that in her, and she hates herself because the song’s corny rhymes embarrass her. She’s sixteen, after all, and won’t admit that she likes the song, so she shakes her head as if the sudden movement will scare off the Spanish lyrics.

Her dad steps on the gas pedal, revving the engine. Griselda presses her lips together, tightening and rolling them into a thin line. The rumble of the motor intensifies, but soon, it peters out. Griselda relaxes. Her shoulders droop down, and her lips return to their normal, full shape, with an undefined Cupid’s bow. Getting off the couch, she closes the door, sticks a mixtape of Metallica and Iron Maiden songs into the home stereo system, and turns the dial to ten. The cassette is a gift from Sergio. He’s the scruffy-looking teen who wears a black Misfits t-shirt, rolled up at the sleeves. He’s the only boy in tenth grade that has a tattoo. On his left arm, there’s a black and grey skull, which looks more like a deformed mushroom. Griselda likes Sergio’s badly done tattoo mainly because she likes him.

The speakers throb with fast, angry, and loud sounds, vibrating the floor and walls surrounding Griselda. She bites her teeth and digs her nails into her palms. Once the truck gets repaired, Griselda knows her dad will come in, wearing his blue trucker hat, motor-oil-stained jeans, brown work boots, and smelling of cigarettes and liquor. Despite any outbursts from her, he’ll grab her suitcase, toss it in the rear of the pickup, and take her away. Seven days ago, he told Griselda he was moving back to Méjico, where things were simpler, but that he wasn’t going to take her with him. Griselda had felt her body, especially her chest, tighten.

The bottom tip of her nose is red, slightly swollen, and stings when touched. Yesterday, without her dad’s knowledge or permission, she took all the money he had out of his wallet. And with her best friend, Sylvia, encouraging her, Griselda got her septum and navel pierced. She also wanted to get her tongue and eyebrow pierced but couldn’t afford it.

Standing in front of the mirror, Griselda yanks off her green army boots, and slides out of her black jeans. She walks in her underwear and makes her way into the kitchen and grips the sharp knife her dad uses to cut his carne asada on Sundays. Griselda kneels to where her pants lie and starts stabbing and scraping. Her jeans become frayed, almost destroyed. Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning” comes to a stop. Outside, the truck engine maintains its roar. It doesn’t stop. The edges of her eyes turn red. She drives the knife into the floor, leaves it sticking up, and pulls her pants to her waist.

Griselda goes to the bathroom and finds her father’s beard trimmer. She holds it for a few seconds and then begins to shave her head. Long, thick hairs clog the trimmer’s blade, and Griselda has to keep removing them to clean it. But even with the blade cleaned, the trimmer doesn’t always cut all the way through; instead, it pulls the hairs. Griselda likes how it feels and pushes the blade hard against her head, inflaming the skin.

Her father walks in and leans on the doorway. He lifts a beer that perspires little, wet beads and sips it. Grime blackens his hands and streaks his cheeks and forehead. He looks like a zombie, she thinks. After he glances at the messy floor and sink, he observes Griselda. She smirks. And he says, “Jesus, Gris, you really want to piss off your mother, don’t you?”

Griselda’s smirk disappears. She wipes her eyes, and over her mouth she smears the heavy-black lipstick she took from the Rite Aid on Redondo Beach Boulevard. Looking at herself in the mirror, she says, “No. Not really.”

“You missed a spot.” He reaches to touch her buzz cut, but Griselda moves, avoiding his hand. She takes a hard, wet-sounding sniff and places the trimmer over the sink’s countertop.

He shrugs his tired shoulders. “Orale. Vamonos ya. Your mother’s waiting,” he says.

When she stomps out of the bathroom, her shoulder digs into her father’s chest. It feels hollow to Griselda, and she tells him, “About time you got that piece of shit to work.” She carries the suitcase outside. It’s heavier than she’d expected, but she’s still able to toss it in the back of the pickup. Before her father jumps in and pulls the Ford away, Griselda ejects his Sonora Dinamita cassette out of the truck’s in-dash stereo and plays her mixtape instead because he hates esa musica. Stuffing his cassette into her pocket, she’s not too sure what she’ll do with it. As he sits, buckles up, and drives, Griselda’s forehead, covered with bits of hair, thumps the glass on the passenger side window and rests there. They pass houses, cars, and she stares at the white lines on the freeway. Picking up speed, the truck shakes and screeches, and the lines become a blur.

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The Painted Skulls, Held by Wings, Glistened in Rain

There is shadow
of a sparrow
left on the window ledge
weeks after the poor bird
had been removed.

The sun melted
a permanent silhouette, tufts
of feathers, and a faint point
of beak still visible
with three days of rain.

Something is wrong.

I had a dream
where I said
this is a dream.

I’m certain
no one noticed
except my father
who knew I’d try
the salted rhubarb
and pomegranate seeds
that wept on my fingers.

Beets turn
into sugar sweetly
on the verge of burn and
I am guilty with happiness
of a kind,
where I survive

as a bird,

an egret
strange and white as my
father’s mustache, a telltale
for his murdered brother.

I don’t say
I’m happy,
a sort of guilty luck
that I love because it fleets
never follows, ripe to the point of rot.

What if nothing moves
still as sleep and my breath
is not enough?

I dream I am
as steel as a swallow
brazen head near bow and drink
its forked tail a salute
between death and habit.
The definition of egret
is wrong,
if I don’t hold
the long legs in absolute stillness.

Tonight, I find a cat
near the shore. Let him eat,
he will eat, he will return to
animal, not pet. I say, here
kitty, kitty. He reveals his belly
to me and all who continue to pass.
I have met people like this.

Three egrets stretch
above me in an arm full of rain
I am older now than my Uncle
dead at 36
all of history caught
in those white wings.
He too was killed for his
feathers, a plume of decoration
in a woman’s hat.

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Looking Both Ways

Demi-Gods, by Eliza Robertson
Bloomsbury, 2017
230 pages, paper, $26

I have been a fan of Canadian novelist Eliza Robertson’s work since reading her short story collection, Wallflowers, released in 2014. Her work shows the precision and intensity of her gaze coupled with an easy and skillful exploration of language that always makes her work a pleasure to read. In Demi-Gods, her first novel, Robertson shows us a deeper settling into character and consciousness often not possible in the short story form. Full of secret interiorities and occupied with the essential question of how we view ourselves and how this choice affects our life’s suite of movements, Demi-Gods pulses with the energy of inner and outer life. It is remarkably consistent in focus, poetic and lucid in its articulations about the human spirit.

The novel is divided into three main parts that take place over different time periods in the narrator, Willa’s, past, followed by a short fourth section set in what is roughly the narrative present. Predominantly set in the ’50s and early ’60s, Willa recounts parts of her late childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood, spent in Salt Spring Island (between Vancouver Island and mainland BC) and, later, California. The narrative crux focuses around Willa’s relationship with Patrick, a sort of half-brother: he is the younger son of her mother’s new boyfriend and arrives on the island with the disruptive energy of unhinged youth. Willa is nine and Patrick is eleven and their relationship is charged: already he ropes her into games of strangeness and degradation. The first game they play is so surprising and aberrant I felt shock and surety that I was in the hands of a capable, original voice: “The vulgarity of the action made me want to laugh—it excited me in a strange way. I could pass all of his tests, even the naughty ones.”

From the relationship springs the core tension of the novel, that is, the power in the act of viewing one another and how this is tethered to the motion of control. Willa’s act of writing, in seeking to rationalize her past, is itself an act of control—we see how the past she is trying to articulate moves and shifts, as do her relationships and her impressions of them. Her fate of being twinned to Patrick, of being reflected in his image, is itself susceptible to warps of movement, to slips and loosenings of focus: themes which transfer themselves to the characters and the drama as the novel develops. We end up on a roiling sea where everything is tilting and the characters are taking turns at being drugged. Robertson seeks to show that there is no archetypal relationship, and yet everything is archetypal. There is always the push-pull of motion, of attention. People make each other do things because they can. Rather than seeking to understand why, Robertson unfurls this type of relationship in its mottled and kaleidoscopic essence. It is inhabited, and not explained: “We sensed the other person, of course, if anything our sense of the other person had intensified, but we allowed each other that civility, to pretend not to know we were watched.”

Because the action takes place in one person’s memory, Robertson can give us the action in full, aesthetically beautiful prose. Her words have a tack—a corporeality that fits with the narration described: “Dad let us live like beach clams. We burrowed in the sand and sucked nutrients from the salt, sand fleas exploring our noses like luminous shrimp. We built clam gardens. We cleared the rock from our beach and constructed a wall. The clams stretched their tongues and spat water between our toes.” Robertson’s emphasis on reflection and vision is repeated throughout the work in instances of stillness and quiet beauty: “Luke’s gaze hung on the lake, which glittered beyond the horsetails and spirals of blackberry […] The water glinted sharply—at that moment, it seemed a lake reflected more light than the sea. The ocean absorbed light, held the sun. A lake spat the sun at you.” There shapes she forms with her sentences are visceral. The work shows a focus on the gestural, which makes words feel like they are touching their subjects: “It took an hour to reach home because I rode one-handed, cradling the jar of cream against my belly-button. […] I wanted to go home. I wanted to hide this cream under my bed, then tiptoe along the trunk of my arbutus tree and think about the boy who drove the dairy cart.”

As the plot develops, Willa’s impressions become more adult-like: she sees her sister marry and then the fallouts of an unhappy union; she knows what it is to have sex. Willa, like Robertson, is an observer and is not drawn to explicitness. It is as though conveying feelings plainly or clear openness would break a spell or not describe the true state of things sufficiently. There are implied understandings, and there is a sense of uncertainty and equivocality that comes with the awareness of not being entirely in control of fate: “I could feel the future encroach as a shadow encroaches on a day when you spend every hour outside and fail to notice the sun slipping below the horizon.”

It is appropriate to end on an excerpt, displaying the essence of the book, Willa’s ultimate solitude, and the turning trajectory of the novel as it is occurring:

When I reached the side, I leaned over the gunwale. A school of fish hung suspended in the water, the light glinting off their bodies before the fleet lifted and tilted into the tide. I could hear Joan and Kenneth fighting in the galley. I tried to block out the sound, inhaled the ocean’s salt on my skin, the tang of seagull shit dried onto the deck. Slowly, larger shadows overtook the shadows of the helm. Then these darknesses—spilled by masts, the boom—were overtaken by the largest shadow, of Earth turning away from the sun. I closed my eyes. The wind fingered the curl that had dropped from my braid, dangling down the nape of my neck.

Languid in feeling yet tautly controlled, Demi-Gods looks at the interiorities we can’t explain to ourselves: what we show and what remains hidden. The final image leaves us with a full tidal pool, suggesting the underbelly of the ringing surface of the world, a multiplicity of hidden movements: “a pool gathered in the lap of a rock with mossy bunches of anemones and gunnel fish and barnacles.” How can we contain what we see when we look backwards? What is uncovered by the action of doing so?

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My Abuela, the Puppet

I have been a fan of metaphor since I learned to read, first in English and then eventually in rusty, copper Spanish. This is not a metaphor. My grandma has become a puppet.

It would be a good metaphor if the circumstances were slightly different. Her body had started to change in the past few years and, though she stayed human, her physique lent itself to a description of her as a marionette. She had clunky, white orthopedic shoes that looked oversized and cartoonish when she took her small, concerted steps. Abuela’s back was permanently hunched over, appearing as if she were being suspended by invisible strings at the shoulders. She lost a lot of weight, and the lack of fat in her face combined with her wrinkled skin made her head look huge like a Muppet’s. But Abuela was still herself then, flesh and bones and dust.

Then she become a puppet and no one knew what to do about it. Papi wouldn’t admit it, but there were signs that her metamorphosis was coming, and it wasn’t just those dreadful orthopedic shoes.

For a long time, Abuela lived in an apartment by herself. Her relationship with my Abuelo had been another precious thing lost to migration, and she’d never bothered to date again. She had her children, who joined her in los Yunai Estais after she’d been cleaning houses, theaters, and embassies for nearly a decade, for nearly minimum wage. But, of course, Papi and his siblings had grown up and left Abuela in that musty-smelling apartment building.

We visited her one afternoon and couldn’t avoid the putrid smell that’d snuck into her home. The whole building smelt of old-person. In less kind words, the carpet and walls smelt of dying. But that morning Abuelita’s apartment did not smell just of dying, but already of death. In the fridge, there were rotten casseroles and the unquestionable stink of not-so-fresh queso fresco. Papi managed to save five slices from the loaf of bread, but everything else went into the trash.

Abuela claimed that she hadn’t smelt the food going bad. Her nose hardly worked anymore, she told us in an attempt to gain our pity. So, we went with her the the supermarket and bought a fridge full of groceries. Two weeks later, they sat in the fridge, largely untouched and mostly spoiled. My grandma had begun to lose weight, but she was still human.

Eventually, Mami convinced Papi to let Abuela move into our home in the suburbs. Abuela said they were being ridiculous, that she was fine in her apartment, that she was happy. But Mami was worried that she’d fall one day, and that no one would be there to help her. The weight loss also worried Mami.

Abuela had a large gut throughout my childhood, the kind that makes you wonder what would happen if you tipped her over and tried rolling her down the street. But by the time she moved into my old bedroom, her gut was gone. If you tipped her over, she’d plop onto the sidewalk like a plank of wood.

There’s a purse that Abuela loves. It’s a knock-off Louis Vuitton that she picked up in MacArthur park a year or so before the rotting fridge fiasco. When she became a puppet, a version of the bag was stitched to her side, though it was made of felt and with less details than the original. But the purse sticks to her side, even as she lays tossed on the ground when there’s no one to hold up the wooden operating cross.

Before she was a puppet, Abuela swung that purse around and hit Papi straight across the cheek, leaving him with neck pains he’d complain about for weeks. She was accusing him of stealing money from her purse. Papi assured her that, no, he hadn’t taken anything from her, but she continued. She remembered putting a stack of twenty-dollar bills in the small pocket of her purse, and now she couldn’t find them. Papi had stolen them, she yelled, the ungrateful son of his father and then she pulled back her flabby arm and took aim.

In his shock, Abuela made a run for it. She pushed past me, with a strength that her limp marionette arms no longer possess. That the woman who sang me lullabies about baby chicks and coyotes would lay her hands on me without any of the tenderness I was used to nearly brought me to tears. It left me immobile as she opened the front door and ran out into the rain-soaked neighborhood with her Louis Vuitton fake.

Mami and Papi got into the minivan and went out searching for her. They spotted her through a sprinkled windshield, waiting at the wrong bus stop. Her plan, my parents would tell me after I’d wiped the bags under my ears dry, was to ride the bus back to her apartment. She had forgotten the bus route to get there, though she’d ridden it often for nearly a decade. It’d slipped her mind that she no longer had a lease on that musty pink apartment.

The home we moved Abuela into after the 75-year-old runaway situation didn’t smell of dying. It was sterile, and the hallways of doors where hers stood was fenced off from the rest of the living facility. A brass gate separated those who could remember and those who couldn’t. A nurse would press a four-number code into a small keypad, and the door would open up to let us through.

Abuela lived in the section for people whose memories were turning into small wisps, ready to float away from their temples and into the clouds. Each of the tenants had their own room, but they’d take all their meals in a large, open-floor dining area. The nurses would go knock on Abuela’s door when it was dinner time and she hadn’t arrived to eat. Her mind was a lost cause, but there was no reason her body had to be as well.

Every visit gave us a clue that we ignored, opting for silence the way Papi had taught Mami and Mami had taught me. One day, Papi asked her how she used to make Christmas tamales. Being the man’s man that he is, he’d never stepped in the kitchen to actually make the dish. But he knew the steps well enough to know that his mother had forgotten them completely.

A professor had assigned an oral history project, so I’d decided to interview Abuela about the war and the way it had affected her migration. She began telling me the story, and the most graphic of details were sharp and clear. She recounted how an army soldier took a machete to a pregnant woman’s stomach because they feared that her baby was a communist. She told me that the guerilleros befriended her favorite cow and three days later murdered it for the meat.

When I prompted her to tell me her immigration story, she’d have to correct herself. Papi, who was sitting just few feet away, eventually led her along, reminding her that she’d gone to Puerto Rico before moving to Miami. He’d stayed in El Salvador for the first two year she’d been in San Juan, he told her, the hurt reverberating in his voice.

Soon she didn’t know our names. She called us all “mijo” or “mija.” Eventually, she opted to simply use “linda,” regardless of the gender of the person she was speaking to. Slowly, we became nearly strangers to us. My grandmother treated us the way she’d treat the mail man or a friend’s relative she was meeting for the first time. There was a sense of trust, but nothing more.

In the months before her metamorphosis, she often repeated a single phrase, over and over. He jaw falling unhinged, then rising again, and then down again. It wasn’t a coherent phrase either, but rather a string of muffled noise. Now, I’m realizing that maybe Abuela was speaking a clandestine language puppets speak when a ventriloquist isn’t pulling at their lips.

Though Abuela was human on all of those trips, I pretended that she wasn’t. Like the other people in this caged home for the forgetful, she’d lost her stories. I’d smile a hollow smile at them, tell Abuela that I loved her even though I knew she didn’t recognize me, and then slink away to a corner of the room.

When she became a puppet, my resentment for her grew. Papi and Mami refused to bury her. She’s not dead, they’d insist, pointing to the place where fish-wire strings met her joints. Mami grabbed my hand and pressed it against Abuela’s skin. The new texture of felt was kinder than the soggy, old leather Abuela’s skin used to feel like, but I still pulled my hand away quickly.

Abuela the Puppet hung in my parent’s home for years. Not wanting to be disrespectful, she watched over us from a hook in our living room–hovering as we watched TV, ate dinner, got into loud arguments. Abuela was the only one who saw when when I snuck a man into the house when I was visiting one Christmas break.

Most days she just hung there, but one weekend, when I was visiting in my few free days from graduate school, she began to sing. Her voice was stronger and clearer than it had been for years before her transformation.

“Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta, y no llores. Porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo los corazones.”

It was my favorite song as a little girl, so I knew she was singing it just for me. My parents stared at me with a concerned look when I told them. When I tugged at Abuela’s strings and moved her mouth up and down my hands, trying to prove to my parents what I’d heard, she didn’t budge. My grandmother remained limp and unmoving. My father placed a wrinkled hand on my shoulder and told me that it might be a sign that I had that memory-denigrating termite Abuela suffered from for so long. It usually skipped a generation.

Mami and Papi died a year-and-a-half apart, leaving me to deal with my grandmother. I hated her. I hated her so much for taking so much space for so long, for forgetting my name, for making a fool of me with her lullaby. I hated her for the termites she’d left in my brain, and for all the pain she was going to put my children through. At church serves, a very seldom occurrence in those days, I’d prayed for death. God, diosito lindo, please don’t make me a puppet.

Online, I found a company that stored family members in Abuela’s condition indefinitely. They’d bought out an old lot of storage units and repurposed them to accommodate rows and rows of human-sized puppets. Most of the puppets were of people who’d formerly fled countries ravaged by wars funded in part by the United States, so when I dropped Abuela off they placed her in the unit marked CENTRAL AMERICA, with the other shrunken caramel grandmothers displaced from the isthmus. As the door to the storage unit closed, Abuela’s jaw twitched. No sound came out. The shell of a woman disappeared into the dark, silent once more.

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The Doctor Laments

For our kidneys cratered

like the swollen moon

For the way time hangs

on our bones

For our confused lungs, blooming

white and yellow destruction

For our exhausted hearts, roused

to expansion by want and need

For the loss of the ancient stars

in our blood and marrow

For the mines of our bodies

that generate iridescent crystals and stones

For the dark shadows shifting

in our souls

And our inability to escape them

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Interview: Joy Harjo

In celebration of Indigenous People’s Day (October 8, 2018), we are happy to present this interview with Joy Harjo.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee/Creek Nation. She is the author of thirteen books—including poetry collections, children’s literature, and memoir—for which she has received numerous awards including the 2002 Pen/Open Book for A Map to the Next World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), the 1991 William Carlos Williams Award for In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan, 1990), and her second American Book Award for her memoir, Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013). She is also a renowned saxophonist and vocalist.

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

The book that you’ve recently released, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings—what number of books is this for you?

Joy Harjo:

I think it’s the eighth poetry book, but I have other books. I have a memoir, two children’s books, a collaborative book with an astronomer, and CDs and music. So that’s the eighth poetry book.

TFR:

Do you find with each book you put them together a little bit differently, in how you approach the assembling in the order of the poems and . . .

Harjo:

Every one is different. It’s like children. [laughter] Yeah. Every one has its own story.

TFR:

Before the poems, you have these italicized sections in your books, and I was curious whether you wrote those after you put the poems in order, or if those were something that you already had that you worked in?

Harjo:

I worked those in to fit, because I’m a horn player too, so they’re like sax riffs. And I think all literature is essentially oral. So it’s another way that I have of saying, “Okay. Here, let’s do a little riff here. And a little riff here.” [laughter] I think most of those I wrote after assembling the poems.

TFR:

I went to your reading this morning, which was just lovely, and I was going to ask if you found it very different to read to poets versus to an audience that was there for music. But you started out with a poem that was very much a song, and I thought it’s kind of both. But do you approach different audiences differently, the poetry audience and the music audience?

Harjo:

I don’t know. I do what I do. I started playing horn when I was almost . . . when I was thirty. And I had been doing poetry for some time, and I already had a name in poetry, and I started adding music. And I thought, All of my poetry audience will come over to the music. But it’s not so. A lot of the poets say, “Well, we just want the poetry, straight. We don’t want anything with it.” And I have a whole music audience who, even though I’m using the poems, they don’t know anything about the poetry.

TFR:

So you find it’s very separated. Two different audiences that don’t have a lot of crossover?

Harjo:

Often, it is. I thought there would be a lot of crossover, and there’s some but not a lot.

TFR:

How does it feel different to be doing a spoken poem versus doing a song, and the feedback that you get from one group or the other?

Harjo:

I think I’ve always seen poetry as a matter of voice because of the way I came to it through my mother writing songs. To me, it’s pretty much the same voice. That’s what I’ve come to. There’s a voice in my saxophone voice, and if you hear my horn voice, my singing voice, the speaking voice, the poetry voice, it’s the same voice. It just expresses itself in different ways.

TFR:

When you edit your work, do you read the pieces aloud to check for the sounds?

Harjo:

I have to. [chuckle] I have to. That’s all part of it. I always tell that to my students: “Read them aloud.” And then there’s the next level of reading aloud. There’s reading aloud to yourself and, in a way, you can always find what’s knotted up or what’s not working. You can usually know, usually. But then, I have found there’s other levels of that, the next level is reading to someone else. Then you will hear more of what’s not working. But the biggest test is reading it to an audience. And I have made the mistake many times of reading new poems to an audience that are too fresh. And I’ll be up in front of the audience with a pen. I’ll make sure if I’m going to do that, I’ll take a pen, because then I hear right away what’s not working. [laughter]

TFR:

Do you find you get good edits out of that, even if you wished . . . you had saved it for later?

[laughter]

Harjo:

Yes, I do. You know how it is, you get so excited when you have a new poem and, then you want to read it, and I’ll have to tell myself, “Okay, just take some time with this.” Because you know, by now . . . if you don’t know by now, [laughter] then you should know by now that you’re going to be full of shame and horror the next day if you don’t let the poem have its time to settle.

TFR:

Have you had pieces that were published in, for instance, a literary magazine and then you put them in a book, and then you find yourself changing things prior to the publication of the second time or the third time?

Harjo:

Yes. One of the poems in Conflict Resolution, “Everybody Has a Heartache,” was published in Poetry Magazine for a Split This Rock conference. And I said, “It’s not ready.” They really liked the poem, the editor of that little section really loved the poem. I said, “But I know it’s not there yet.” But they wanted it anyway, so I gave it to them. So it’s much revised in the book. And even in the title poem, “Conflict Resolution,” there’s a whole section I would totally rewrite or take out.

TFR:

There was a lot of myth and cultural story woven into this book. And I taught history and English for many years, and as I was reading it, I kinda felt like I had done a disservice because of how little we talk about the stories of culture rather than just the history. Because it should be a part of history, and it’s often not. What do you feel is the importance of people’s individual stories?

Harjo:

History is stories. It’s just what’s called history is usually the old. I think the feminists came up with it, history meaning “his story.” And yet, ultimately, history is the stories of everyone who was there, including the plants, including the animals, including the rooms things happen in. [laugh] It’s all part of the story.

TFR:

Do you find that where you are writing influences what you are writing? If you’re home or if you’re traveling, do you find you come to different kinds of subject matter?

Harjo:

I’ve wondered about that. I remember when I moved to Hawaii for eleven years, and I had always wanted to be there, in the Pacific. I love the Pacific. But it was startling—even as much as I felt so at home and I loved the water and I got into outrigger canoe racing—that I had been so ingrained in the Southwest and Oklahoma where I’m from and that history. To move into another place was very difficult for my writing, at least for a while. A lot of the writing from that time . . . I don’t think is my best.

TFR:

Do you find that writing in the Southwest the landscape lends itself to being spare with words and conscious of every one?

Harjo:

I don’t know if it did that, but when I started writing I was learning the Navajo language. And I loved that . . . New Mexico, I went there to go to Indian boarding school and came back home for a little bit, for about a year or two, and then went back. But the poetry, the spirit of the poetry came to me there. And it’s so much a part of me. I miss it so much. I’ll be in Tuscon next week. I’m excited about that. But I really miss the Southwest. It’s very much a part of my poetry, as is the story of my people. As is Hawaii, the water and the spirit of the water, who is one of my biggest teachers. So, places do affect me. I travel. I’ve always been a traveler. Even as a child when we didn’t go anywhere, books were my means of traveling, as well as walking and trying. They gave me that sense of discovery, discovery of new places.

TFR:

You’ve talked about the importance of paying attention to the sunset and what you can let go at that time period. Do you feel like in your travels, you have to make a conscious effort to be aware of time and the sun and what’s going on outside of, maybe, the rooms that you’re in, more so than when you’re home?

Harjo:

Yes, they’re like markers. You realize we’re all in the ceremony of sunrise. I was watching the sun come up in my room . . . It was nice. I usually request a room that has an east view, but I didn’t and I had an east room anyway. What cracked me up is the guy said, “Oh yeah, and you have a balcony, too,” but my balcony looks out over a parking garage and the freeway. I didn’t get an ocean view with this trip. [laughter]

TFR:

Conflict Resolution for Human Beings includes this poem set in Vancouver about walkabout, and you had the dead umbrella and the broken wings. And as much as it’s hard to travel a lot, do you also find value in it, in that it brings you to pieces you might not have otherwise written?

Harjo:

Oh, sure. I think, I would say probably three-fourths. [chuckle] Most of those poems are set in places, like the one in British Columbia. One of the earlier ones, I’m in a hotel. Louis Armstrong’s band had been there, and the hotel had turned to trash, and yet the King of Jazz had been there. They resurrect . . . That’s one of the first little riffs that starts off the book. And, yeah, there’s a lot of horn, meeting horn players, out playing horn on the street. And even death appears. That’s a traveler. [laughter]

TFR:

Yes, yes, yes.

Harjo:

But, yes, there are also several poems in there about Hawaii, about Oklahoma. I get to travel quite frequently.

TFR:

So often when reading bios of you, they very much emphasize the history of and your role in Native literature in the US. Do you ever feel that it’s kind of a burden to be speaking, in some people’s minds, for a whole group of people as opposed to just for yourself?

Harjo:

I can’t think about that because I know that I don’t speak for anybody else. I just follow that voice that was given to me to take care of. So I can’t even speak on behalf of my family. [laughter] You know how most families are? Everybody’s so different. But it’s true that I have often been, through the years, the token or the person that’s speaking on behalf of anyone that’s not your all-American male. [laughter] So it’s an impossible situation, an even bizarre situation sometimes. And there are many Native writers and many Native poets who also have a place. They have a place, though a lot of people aren’t going for, or they don’t wind up in a large of an arena. Their poetry or their songs are very important at home, and that’s what’s important. It’s not about being at a big-book thing. One of the first times I went back to the ceremonial ground, and they have a speaker that goes around, and I remember when he came by my camp, he says, “And you can leave your university books, all of that behind because this is not the place for them.” It’s a different world. There’s literature there, and there’s a place. A different system.

TFR:

Do you find that the people in your life have a great awareness of you as a poet? Do you find that they have an expectation of not being included in a poem or being included in a poem?

Harjo:

I guess I don’t do a lot of using my poetry as a tool or wielding my poetry . . .

TFR:

Yeah. [laughter]

Harjo:

Not like a novelist or a . . . My memoir though, that was another story. But I don’t think they worry about it too much. And it was funny when I lived in Hawaii—people knew me as a canoe paddler, someone who paddled canoes, outrigger canoes, and they knew me. I remember going down to the Kapalama Post Office to mail out a box, and the woman looked at my name and she looked at me, and she says, “Oh, you’re the one that makes those really good cookies.” [laughter] So I thought, “Okay,” that’s what I was. People had no idea of my life as a poet.

TFR:

Do you find that when you were paddling, that that act of paddling, that the movement ever served to have words come to you that you would use later, that that was a meditative state? Or were you very much focused on just the paddling itself?

Harjo:

It’s kind of all of that. When you’re involved in an act that can be very strenuous, there’s different ones when you’re racing and then when you’re practicing. I almost said rehearsing. And then when you’re doing this practicing, you’re focused. You’re really focused. But there is something about the rhythm. And so much does come to you, even as so much falls away. And being out there at sunset or at sunrise is just incredible. And moving in a rhythm.

TFR:

Do you ever get on the water at night, after dark?

Harjo:

I have been, and it was kind of dangerous.

[laughter]

We were out one time with the canoe club with our group, and we went way out and we got in trouble because we were out near the lane where the ships were coming in, got beeped at. So then we were paddling back and it got dark, and it’s kind of . . . It’s cool, but then you can hear the wave action where you have to come in. And you have to know where to come in, and so that gets a little . . . dangerous. Maybe like poetry.

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Dancing Glitch

As part of The Florida Review and Aquifer: TFR Online’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and Latinx contributors, we are featuring three videos by multi-media artist, theorist, and historian Michael Betancourt. This week we present the second video in this series, Dancing Glitch. Betancourt’s work will also be featured in the upcoming fall print issue of The Florida Review.

Loie Fuller, the American choreographer and dancer, was an early inspiration for Cubist abstraction with her Serpentine Dance; her performance in Lumiere vue no. 76 (1896) provided the original source material for this visual music work.

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Into the Sun

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Two Poems from “open pit”

These poems are from Villarán’s forthcoming collection open pit.

he likes to stare at walls

you were born in davis

in a small inflatable pool

in april

during those first weeks, you would often wake up crying

in the middle of the night. without really knowing how

i would pick you up from the crib and hold you tight against

my chest, until you calmed down, and fell asleep again

i liked staying like this for a while

staring at the darkness

that would become the wall

the world is waiting in line / at target

imagine us in the car a sunny day the windows down

driving to the beach 88.3 driving and all those cars next to us driving

always in movement the highway is always full because the more

lanes we build the more cars are attracted to the smell of concrete

and white arrows painted over seemingly endless black surfaces:

the original infrastructure of future battlefields

imagine thousands of small highways running inside of you

all those cars driving somewhere taking something someone like us

perhaps to the beach with your mother so we would have the cooler

and the tent the umbrellas and the surfboards imagine all those cars

going somewhere taking something driving someone imagine all that

movement all that continuous movement the displacement dislocation

bodies inside metal vehicles on black surfaces running

imagine thousands of small really really small

a huge conveyor belt a network of swollen arteries imagine an open pit

an open wound the skin rupturing imagine your leg imagine your arm

imagine my leg imagine my arm

a big bag of tendons and ligaments necrotic tissue a bundle of nerve

tissue imagine bags of plastic inside your stomach lining your

intestines and climbing up your esophagus through the larynx

the lack of oxygen

imagine these huge pond type structures with plastic geothermal

liners stretching across the mountains dissecting the mountains

becoming the new mountain the only landscape leaching ponds laid

out in endless geometrical patterns

imagine every single muscle every fiber every synapse every neuron

needed for you to type with your right index finger:

n. n. n.
the letter n

imagine thousands of small highways pulsating inside of you

imagine it never stopping

thousands of small highways and the cars and the people and the things

and the places they want to take those things to because that’s what we

do we go places with things and we use metal vehicles that travel on

seemingly endless black surfaces just imagine all of this happening all

the time all the time happening all the time always

this highway

there’s no outside

this open pit

this wound this rupture this crevice inside body this highway all the time

always

what i’m trying to say miqel is:

just imagine thousands of small highways always running inside of you

imagine everything that’s needed for this to happen

all the time

always

now imagine an open pit a large open pit in the middle of a valley

surrounded by fractured mountains

i think that’s how it works

we have that pit

we keep running: faster faster faster

birds die and their stomachs are filled with plastic

whales die and their stomachs are filled with plastic

the united states economy gets a billion-dollar daily shot in its arm

imagine your arm

i’m thinking of mine

we have that pit

and we fill it with these things

we keep running faster always faster

now imagine us at the beach, imagine it being sunny again but not

too hot, imagine the sky punctuated by a few curious clouds, your

mother would be smiling, she’s beautiful when she smiles

it’s still happening

i don’t know what it is

i’m not sure what to do about it either

but i know it’s happening, all the time, always, relentless

we have that pit, it’s open, really open

and things are exploding and people are breaking and burning and dying

and we’re distracted

because we love the sand

the salt in the water

the cool air

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Category: Aquifer